Apple has a wonderful, transparent solution called Time Machine that automatically backs up your hard drive over a wired or wireless network. No muss, no fuss, and no special software required. It just works. Hard drive crashed? No problem! Just pop in a blank drive, hold down the option key while booting, then select your network backup and BAM - you will be automatically restored to your new drive and back up and running within 20 minutes.

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"I've been in more laps than a napkin" - Mae West

Well, like I said . . .

Time Machine is not an online backup service. It is an automatic backup system that is built into Mac OS X Leopard, and comes standard on new Mac computers. Instead of backing up your files online, Time Machine copies your documents onto an external hard drive. Time Machine is similar to an online backup service in that it works automatically in the background, and requires no actions or interference from you after the initial set up process.

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Steve Binghamwww.dustylens.comwww.ghost-town-photography.com

Local backups are at best 1/2 the solution. When a burglar or fire claim both your computer and local backup, you'll wish you had something else. Offsite storage is critical.

I just recently started using AWS Glacier for super cheap cloud storage (1 cent / GB / month). There are several clients available that make backing up to the service completely handsoff (incremental backups like Time Machine). I haven't found cheaper storage anywhere. The downside is that it is an archival tier of storage, so you will pay to get your data back (5% of your data can be downloaded for free each day, after that you'll pay an additional 1 cent / GB).

-Rick

+1 on theft and acts of God. That's why I keep some of my backups at work. A friend has a small company and he backs up data across different computers in the office. One day all the computers were stolen. So there goes the data.